Here’s an awesome article from New Scientist, and some video to go along with it.
In a revelation that destroys yet another cherished notion of human uniqueness, wild chimpanzees have been seen living in caves and hunting bushbabies with spears. It is the first time an animal has been seen using a tool to hunt a vertebrate.
Many chimpanzees trim twigs to use for ant-dipping and termite-fishing. But a population of savannah chimps (Pan troglodytes verus) living in the Fongoli area of south-east Senegal have been seen making spears from strong sticks that they sharpen with their teeth. The average spear length is 63 centimetres (25 inches), says Jill Pruetz at Iowa State University in Ames, US, who observed the behaviour with Paco Bertolani, of the University of Cambridge, UK.
And the method of procuring food with these tools is not simply extractive, as it is when harvesting insects. It is far more aggressive. They use the spears to hunt one of the cutest primates in Africa: bushbabies (Galago senegalensis).
Bushbabies are nocturnal and curl up in hollows in trees during the day. If disturbed during their slumbers — if their nest cavity is broken open, for example — they rapidly scamper away. It appears that the chimps have learnt a grisly method of slowing them down.
[…]
And, in what is thought to be another first for chimps, the Fongoli population have taken up aspects of cave living. They use the the shady interiors for socialising, taking siestas and picnicking, the researchers say. Pruetz jokes that she would not be surprised if the chimps began making cave drawings.
[…]
Chimps regularly seem to be discovered doing things once thought unique to humans (see Stone Age chimps were handy with a hammer). “Back to the drawing board again in terms of trying to define how humans are special,†says Pruetz.
There’s video of this at YouTube:
There are also a variety of ignorant comments:
Ummm… I don’t see any spear or an ape killing an animal with a spear 90% of the vid is an ape eating a lemur thing and as for the stick(not a spear) it was holding it was probably just eatingit for food YA TOOLS!
Are you kidding me. This video is claiming to be a chimp spearing his prey? The only problem is that there is nothing of the sort taking place. Evolutionist are really reaching imo.
whats that thing on its ass?
[New Scientist: Spear-wielding chimps snack on skewered bushbabies]
The chimp crawls around with a stick, then another chimp eats something. How is this a chimp spearing anything? How are the first two comments you posted ignorant?
Since I’ve had two people call me on this in two days, I’ll explain my rationale for calling these “ignorant”.
The actual text from the YouTube post was this: “Adolescent female Tumbo isolates a potential spear and modifies it. She begins to jab it into a tree to spear her prey. She then climbs the tree and begins jumping on the large limb, which eventually breaks off, allowing her to reach in and retrieve the prey, a bushbaby (Galago senegalensis).”
The first commenter writes “stick (not a spear)”, apparently conflating form with function. The commenter believes that the chimp is eating the stick for food. He beleives that the people claiming the chimp is hunting are “tools”. All three of these points are typical knee-jerk ignorant internet responses.
The second comment claims that “nothing of the sort [spearing] is taking place”. Actually it is taking place, but the video doesn’t do a good job of capturing it. Just because the commenter doesn’t believe it occurred doesn’t mean it didn’t. The researchers were there and documented it. The “evolutionists are really reaching imo” fragment is completely irrelevant. Evolutionists have nothing to do with this video.
Christians ought to be able to accept evidence of animal intelligence as part of the beauty of God’s creation instead of rejecting it as evolutionary propaganda.
I’ll grant that the first two commenters are correct if they’re complaining that the video does a poor job of documenting the hunting behavior, but I still believe their comments demonstrate ignorance.
“Christians ought to be able to accept evidence of animal intelligence as part of the beauty of God’s creation instead of rejecting it as evolutionary propaganda.”
As a Christian who believes that evolution is a farce, I agree. I haven’t seen any evolutionary propaganda in your posts so far. Besides, if he is rejecting that the chimp might possibly be using tools because he thinks it might be evidence for evolution, what does he think of the proven fact that crows sometimes use tools to get meals out of tight spots? The fact is that even if the chimp actually is using a tool (the video was very poorly done and it’s not evident in it), it really can’t be used for evidence of evolution. That would really be stretching.
I’m going to sound like a bloody advertisement, but I think I saw footage of this on a WETA/ PBS show called Nature (the 40-something minute long documentaries that are sponsored by Cannon cameras). I don’t recall its subtitle, though, but that should be enough to track it down, if you’re dedicated to proving, or disproving matters.
Please forgive my commercial-sounding comment.